Entertainment

StarCraft II and the Rise of American Pro Gaming

Marc Georges is a freelance journalist. He writes about how technology is shaping our culture and society. In his free time, Marc produces comedy videos on news and politics with his pals at The Full Ginsburg. Follow him @marcgeorges.

There’s no mistaking it: Columbus, Ohio is a sports town. Drive through the city streets and you’ll see Ohio State University bumper stickers everywhere. On the Sunday after the Buckeyes beat Syracuse and secured a spot in this year’s Final Four, locals met at coffee shops and bars, debating the team’s chances at a national championship. But at the nearby Greater Columbus Convention Center, a different group of sports fans gathered.

In the bowels of this concrete building, thousands of cheering fans greeted top competitors from around the world like they were rock stars. It was a sight reminiscent of a boxing match. Except the sport the crowd was here to see was StarCraft II, an online, real-time strategy game set in the 26th century, where three alien races duke it out in a war for intergalactic supremacy.

This tournament, known as the Major League Gaming (MLG) Winter Championship, included pros and amateurs competing for $76,000 in prizes. A seeded bracket grouped pros from South Korea, Europe and North America against each other, while an open bracket let anyone with a dream and quick reflexes try for the big cash prize. Winners from both brackets would then be pitted against each other, with one eventual champion.

The game is a phenomenon that's been around for nearly ten years, but it has only recently started to gain real traction in the sports-obsessed U.S. And everyone from the people behind MLG to professional gamers from South Korea want to be part of this coming-out party.

MLG Winter Championship

StarCraft is one of the most popular titles in the world of professional gaming (or "e-sports"), particularly in South Korea. Blizzard Entertainment launched the game in 1998, and that quickly spawned two sequels: StarCraft: Brood War and StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty. Today, there are more than 3.5 million StarCraft II players worldwide.

Gamers often describe the StarCraft series as the national pastime of South Korea. There, obsession is so acute that cable channels are dedicated to the e-sport and regularly air live matches from the Global StarCraft League (GSL), the world’s most competitive professional StarCraft association.

Korean pros, between the ages of 16 and 31, are national celebrities. The best players can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. Take 19-year old Jeong Jong Hyeon, better known by his handle "Mvp." In 2011, he earned just under $250,000. That’s not including corporate endorsements and sponsorship deals, according to SC2earnings, an industry website that tracks gamers’ compensation.

But within the past year, European and U.S. players have started to catch up, defeating Korean players once thought unstoppable, and propelling this e-sport onto the international scene.

Coming to America

Major League Gaming, a North American-based professional electronics sports organization, is among Starcraft's many benefactors. It recently came off a successful 2011 season with record levels of StarCraft online viewership and attendance. The company says fans from 175 countries consumed more than 3.6 million hours of live streaming content last year and another 97,000 attended their 2011 Championship events.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Sundance DiGiovanni agrees the game’s popularity has been integral to MLG’s growth. “StarCraft II is a game that had a global audience built into it with a storied history,” he says. “You just had these players who had been around, who were engaged with the game, and were personalities on a global scale, so it just set us up to succeed.”

Last year, the company announced an exchange program with GSL, where top South Korean players were flown to the U.S. to compete at live events in exchange for placing top-performing non-Korean players in the GSL. Marcus "djWHEAT" Graham, a broadcaster, who has called MLG tournaments, says it wasn’t just the fans pushing for more inclusion of South Korean players. The players themselves quickly realized they were idols who commanded respect. Naturally, that was appealing.

The exchange program also attracted a far more competitive group of players to MLG events because players wanted to defeat the best, and the best are still the South Koreans. “There’s a huge amount on the line. The money, that's a total side thing. It’s all about the prestige and the pride,” says 22-year-old U.K. native Benjamin Baker, who competes under the handle "DeMuslim."

From Game to Job

StarCraft II has not only helped grow organizations like MLG, it’s also had a mind-boggling impact on pro players' lives. As StarCraft II became more popular, teams in Europe and the U.S. started to emulate the South Korean model of professional teams, which provide salaries, team housing, coaching, PR, and management support to their players. That’s why Baker relocated to the U.S., after a team that goes by the name of Evil Geniuses started courting him. “My whole life's changed for the better…I’m living in America right now, living in a mansion with all my friends,” he says. “It's the craziest. Even if I tell it to myself I can't believe it.”

It would be easy to then assume that these players have it made: getting paid to play a video game, living in a house with their friends, and traveling the globe signing autographs for adoring fans. But Baker, who puts in a minimum of eight hours a day on the game, is quick to dispel that notion. “I wake up at StarCraft, I go to bed at StarCraft, I have lunch at StarCraft,” he says. “It's tough. And it is like a real job.”

The reality is, only about 30 players in the world, two-thirds of them South Korean, win enough money to support themselves, according to SC2Earnings. “Some of these guys are only operating off of sponsorships and t-shirt sales, and believe me, it’s tough," DiGiovanni says. “I'd love to say that down the line there will be a set number of teams and they'll be profit sharing, but we’re a ways from that for a number of reasons.”

Among the reasons is that there is no governing body that represents all the teams and players like there is in other sports, such as basketball. Right now, the e-sports scene in StarCraft resembles something closer to a loose federation of players, who sign on with teams, but whose teams don't organize together. DiGiovanni says salaries that range from $50,000 to $75,000 for 100 players is a good goal, but eventually sponsorships and endorsement deals should be the driving factor.

An Online Proliferation

The fans in Columbus are only a small subset of those following the action at the Winter Championship. Web streaming is the main way most StarCraft fans enjoy the sport. MLG says its last major event, MLG Providence, topped out at 241,000 concurrent viewers last fall. Sometimes fans will stream a game at home but increasingly they’re gathering at "barcrafts," which are get togethers at bars to watch live-streamed StarCraft games. Hannah Bachelder, tournament director for One Nation of Gamers — a group of e-sports fans turned entrepreneurs — says her organization has seen great demand for the events and regularly sponsors barcrafts in 15 cities across the country from New York City to San Francisco.

Streamed matches are called by broadcasters, also known as casters, who are usually former players with millions of pageviews on YouTube and legions of dedicated fans. This is why, during the Winter Championship, MLG assembled a hot list of casters: Daniel 'Artosis' Stemkoski, Nicholas 'Tasteless' Plott, his brother Sean 'Day[9]' Plott, and Marcus 'djWHeat' Graham. Like the top players in the game, these casters launched careers off StarCraft II, signing contracts with leagues in North America and South Korea to call tournament matches. For older fans, like Graham, who’s been in this scene for 12 years, streaming games is the beginning of what he hopes is widespread acceptance of StarCraft. “It’s nice to see it finally grow to a level I wanted [it] to grow to, and I feel like I've had the opportunity to play a big part in that,” he says. “Now I want to make sure I do whatever I can to keep that momentum going, and to keep it growing, bring in more [of the] mainstream audience, and more mainstream sponsors."

Small, but Mighty

Still, StarCraft in the U.S. pales in comparison to South Korea, where teams are sponsored and bankrolled by heavy hitters, like Samsung and the South Korean Air Force. But U.S.-based e-sports companies are hoping to see significant growth because of the growing popularity of StarCraft II and the expected release of a new edition, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm, later this year.

Not that this has stopped MLG from cashing in. It currently charges fans $30 a year for a streaming subscription to view their events and between $25 and $35 for tickets to attend events like the Winter Championship. The company’s revenues come from a combination of direct-to-consumer sales, licensing, merchandising, sponsorships, and advertising.

This has made corporate sponsors start to notice that e-sports give them access to the younger demographic they crave. In the last year, MLG has announced a bevy of new partners. iBUYPOWER is now the official desktop computer. There is also an official razor (Bic), soft drink (Dr. Pepper), and energy drink (NOS). In March of last year, the company announced a sponsorship with Sony Ericsson to make the XPeria Play handset the official mobile phone of MLG. DiGiovanni says partners are interested in working with MLG because the company is successful in getting these products into the hands of e-sports fans. “We can move bottles of soda, smartphones, shavers, you name it,” he says.

In the End

It was 8:00 PM on Sunday evening in Columbus, and only two players remained: 18-year-old Lee 'MarineKingPrime' Jung Hoon and 20-year-old Park 'DongRaeGu' Soo Ho. The players were two of the best up-and-coming South Koreans in the sport. The final was a rematch of MLG’s previous tournament, the Winter Arena Challenge qualifier, where MarineKingPrime defeated DongRaeGu to take home a $10,000 prize and the number-one seed going into the Winter Championship tournament.

The fans rose to their feet and cheered as the announcer called each player onto the stage. After the players exchanged pleasantries, they retreated to their respective corners, where each entered a clear booth, plastered with Blizzard and MLG tags.

Within these pods, the players were shielded from the distractions of the outside world. They wore large, black headphones so that they could focus on the game and not the crowd noise or the broadcasters. The transparent enclosures allowed the audience, and cameramen, to watch as the players strategized and reacted to the game.

The series was a best-of-nine-games matchup, and each player took two of the first four games. In game five, MarineKing started to pick up some momentum, easily taking the match in about 15 minutes. Game six was more competitive, and at one point, it seemed like DongRaeGue would be able to pull off the win, but MarineKing’s forces were too much and he was overwhelmed. Game seven was a blow-by-blow fight, with each player attacking aggressively. In the climactic battle, MarineKingPrime's armies steamrolled his opponent at the 14-minute mark. Thirty seconds later, MarineKingPrime was officially the winner. He took off his headphones in disbelief and emerged from the booth smiling, a South Korean e-sports champion basking in the adulation of a crowd of Ohio gaming fanatics. It was March madness indeed.

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